1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an operation control device, an operation control method, and a computer-readable recording medium for gestural control of a controllable device.
2. Description of the Related Art
With the developments in IT, sophisticated electronic equipment has become widespread. As the electronic equipment becomes more sophisticated, instruction contents from a user for causing the electronic equipment to execute a function become diversified. Consequently, the demands on a User Interface (UI) which is easy to understand and has excellent operability are increasing. For example, with regard to a personal computer (hereinafter, referred to as “PC”), a character based UI, in which a command character string is input by a user using a keyboard, has been mainly used conventionally. Recently, however, a Graphical User Interface (GUI) has been widely used, which is a user interface in which an image such as an icon or a window shown on a display screen is operated with a pointer on the display screen by a user using a pointing device such as a mouse to thereby input an instruction.
The operability of the electronic equipment such as PC has been improved by using the GUI. However, there are still some users who are not getting used to the operation of a mouse and the like and feel uncomfortable to operate them, and hence, the operability is not good for all users. Consequently, there is demanded development of a UI in which an instruction can be input more intuitively and naturally. For example, a motion of moving a part of the body of the user in space is associated with an operation content which can be easily imagined intuitively from the motion, and then a predetermined operation can be executed by the user moving his/her body.
For example, as shown in FIG. 9, displayed on a screen 10 are a reproduction operation section 12 for performing operations such as reproducing, fast-forwarding, fast-rewinding, and stopping music or video, and a volume control section 14 for operating volume. In this case, the user can operate the reproduction operation section 12 and the volume control section 14 in such manners that the reproduction state of music is changed and the volume is controlled by moving a finger F left and right. Further, for example, there is disclosed a control system which can be operated by assigning up, down, left, and right movement operations using 5-way key, which is capable of performing selection/decision as well as moving a pointer or the like up, down, left, and right, to movement gestures of the user's arm, palm, finger, and other appendages in space (e.g., Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2005-31799).